CHAPTER XXVIII
The Power of a Beggar
The Contents of the Saddle-Bag
I had escaped, but the delay was ruinous. The sun sank when I reached the brow of the mountain, and Masada lay many a weary mile forward. I cast off the tribune’s horse, thus giving his insolent master evidence that I did not understand the main point of my trade, and stood pondering to what point of the mighty ridge that rose blue along the horizon I should turn, when, in the plunge of the horse as he felt himself at liberty, his saddle came to the ground. The possibility of its containing reports of the state of the enemy led me to examine its pockets; they were stuffed with letters worthy of the highest circles of Italian high life; the ill-spelled registers of an existence at a loss how to lose its time; of libertinism sick of indulgence, and of pecuniary embarrassment driven to the most hopeless and whimsical resources.
A glance at a few of those epistles was enough, and I scattered into the air the reputations of half the high-born maids and matrons of Rome; but as I was turning away with an instinctive exclamation of scorn at this compendium of patrician life, my eye was caught by a letter addressed to the governor of Masada. In opening it, I committed no violation of diplomacy, for it held no secret other than an angry remission of his allegiance by some wearied fair one, who announced her intended marriage with the tribune.
The Distant Sound of Strife
My revenge was thus to go further than my intent, for I deprived him of the personal triumph of delivering this calamitous despatch to his rival. Yet, on second thought, conceiving that some cipher might lurk under its absurdity, I secured the paper, and giving the rein, left the whole secret correspondence of debt, libel, and love to the delight of mankind. I flew along; my indefatigable barb, as if she felt her master’s anxieties, put forth double speed. But I had yet a fearful distance to traverse. The night came, but I had no time to think of rest or shelter. I pushed on. The wind rose and wrapt me in whirls of sand. I heard the roar of waters. The ground became fractured, and full of the loose fragments that fall from rocky hills. I found that I was at the foot of the ridge and had lost my way. In this embarrassment I trusted to the sagacity of my steed. But thirst led her directly to one of the mountain torrents, and the phosphoric gleam of the waters alone saved us both from a plunge over a precipice, deep enough to extinguish every appetite and ambition in the round of this bustling world.
To find a passage or an escape, I alighted. The torrent bellowed before me. A wall of rock rose on the opposite side. After long climbings and descents, I found that I had descended too deep to return. Oh, how I longed for the trace of man, for the feeblest light that ever twinkled from the cottage window! I felt the plague of helplessness. To attempt the torrent was impossible. To linger where I stood till dawn was misery.
What would be going on meanwhile? Perhaps, at the very time while I was standing in wretched doubt, imprisoned among those pestilent cliffs, the deed was doing. Constantius was, with ineffectual gallantry, assaulting the fortress; my brave kinsmen were sacrificing their lives under the Roman spears, and I was not there!